Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook! I’m so glad you’re here!
This week I am continuing my reviews of carbon steel pans and today, I am featuring the Lodge 8″ Carbon Steel French Skillet. I’m going to go over the measurements, weight, and some performance metrics. For full disclosure: I bought this pan myself and all the opinions are my own.
Let’s start with the details:
My pan weighs in at 2 pounds, 5 ounces. It is 8″ inches in diameter and the sides slope down to a 5.5″ cooking surface. Its handle features the Lodge logo and is a generous 9 inches in length. There is a hole at the end of handle for easy hanging if you are lucky enough to have a hanging rack. It is dark gray in color and all the edges on the pan are sharp, but completely finished–you’re not going to cut yourself on it or anything, but it’s pretty utilitarian-looking. The handle is firmly riveted to the pan with three prominent rivets and overall, this is a solid piece of steel.
Here’s a look at the pan:
Now let’s get to some performance metrics:
First, I heated the pan on medium heat for four minutes. It reached a temperature of 367*.
Next, I heated the skillet to 400*F, removed it from the heat to a cold, cast iron grate and tested its temperature after one minute, after two minutes, three minutes and finally after 5 minutes to see how quickly the heat dissipated. Here’s what I found:
After one minute, the pan had cooled to 323*; after two minutes, it had cooled to 271*; after three minutes, it had cooled to 232*; and after five minutes, it had cooled to 177*.
The handle really never got hot, although it was warm by the end of the test, so the heat did eventually radiate down, but it took a while. At no point was it ever too hot to handle, versus that Smithey handle, which got pretty hot by the end of the test.
Overall, the heat-retention performance of this skillet was comparable to the Smithey, which cooled to 324* after one minute, 279* after two minutes, 244* after three minutes and to 197* at five minutes.
The area where the Lodge differed from the Smithey carbon steel rather dramatically, was in how long it took the Lodge skillet to heat up versus the Smithey carbon steel pan–and I ran this experiment several times because I really thought I must be doing something wrong.
One reason professional chefs favor carbon steel is because it is very responsive to the heat source, or lack thereof, so in theory, they should heat up quickly. Now–steel in general is not a terrific conductor of heat (although carbon steel is better than stainless steel) and so hot spots are common in any steel cookware. I thought I must be just hitting the cold spots on the Smithey carbon steel pan, but I ran this test four times and came up with more or less the same results.
I heated the cold pan on a cold stove grate on high heat and the Smithey carbon steel pan took almost five minutes to heat up to 400*, where the Lodge carbon steel reached 400* in a little under two minutes.
There are a couple of metrics to consider here: the Lodge is only 8″ in diameter, where the Smithey is 9″. The Lodge weighs 2 pounds, five ounces, where the Smithey weighs in at about 3.1 pounds. Also, because the Smithey is hand-hammered, the bottom cooking surface is harder to calculate, but is probably about 6″, although the absolutely flat portion of the bottom of the pan is 4.5″. So, these differences may have impacted the heat-up time. However, in both cases, I made sure to target the heat gun more or less in the middle of the cooking surface.
So…which do I like better? Well, I guess it depends on what I want to use it for. The Lodge carbon steel seems to be performing more like I expected carbon steel to perform. But friends, it ain’t much to look at. It’s a drab color and looks very utilitarian. While it seems very solid and well made, I’m not wild about the sharp edges and the three giant rivets attaching the handle to the pan. Overall, the pan just looks clunky.
The Smithey, on the other hand, is GORGEOUS. Its design is elegant and graceful, with two small rivets securely attaching the handle to the pan and features hand-hammering on the bowl of the pan. It is, however, about four times as expensive as the Lodge, coming in at a whopping $200.00, where you can pick up the Lodge carbon steel 8″ skillet for under 50 bucks at most places. This is not to say that the Smithey isn’t worth the money–they are two different animals: the Smithey is hand-hammered, where the Lodge is stamped and probably hand finished on some level, but not to scale of the Smithey.
In my next post, I will share how my Finex, Blacklock and Smithey cast iron pieces fared in their respective paces. After that, I’ll compare and contrast the carbon steel to the cast iron and share some cooking test results.
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
